The LEGO Marvel theme has leaned heavily into a specific type of set in the past couple of years, culminating in a 2024 release that feels like it’s suffering a crisis of identity.
While a handful of other themes have been following a strict template for diorama-style sets with a piece-heavy black base – see the LEGO Star Wars Diorama Collection, 21350 Jaws, 77015 Temple of the Golden Idol and so on – LEGO Marvel has been happily doing its own thing since summer 2023, when 76261 Spider-Man Final Battle and 76266 Endgame Final Battle arrived on shelves. Those sets smash together twin concepts of playset and display set atop a relatively crude black base.
Others have followed since, including 76291 The Avengers Assemble: Age of Ultron and (bizarrely) 76280 Spider-Man vs. Sandman: Final Battle, while another is due to hit shelves in January in 76314 Captain America: Civil War Battle. But it’s the Age of Ultron set where the line between playset and display set is not so much blurred as smudged beyond the point of comprehensibility.
Picture this: a LEGO Marvel set based on an Avengers action sequence, which includes all the main Avengers cast from the Infinity Saga, plus three baddies to fight. Throw in stud shooters, a vehicle, a tower and an exploding bunker and you’ve got yourself a playset going. But what if you then pop it on a black base, include transparent elements for careful placement of those minifigures, anchor the falling trees in place and essentially depict a single, specific frame from a nine-year-old movie?
Okay, sure. But that then sounds like you’ve got a display set going actually. And hey presto, 76291: is it a playset? Is it a display set? Who knows! It certainly feels like the set itself doesn’t. The builds aren’t impressive enough individually or together to make for a detailed display model (the likes of which you might expect from even the similarly-priced LEGO Star Wars dioramas), but then if it’s a playset it doesn’t make sense for it to sit on a random black base.
As mentioned up top, 76291 The Avengers Assemble: Age of Ultron is really only the latest in a line of LEGO Marvel sets that flirt with both play and display simultaneously, attempting to cater to multiple audiences all in the one box. With a few quick adjustments to 76291, for example – cut out the modularity (the tower and bunker can detach from the central section) and stud shooters, dial up the detail in those areas – you can easily imagine the LEGO Group popping an 18+ label on the packaging.
But the LEGO Marvel theme is clearly not quite so keen to lean into its 18+ audience as Star Wars, which is accepting day by day that the demographic for a galaxy far, far away is no longer children (see those $1,000 Death Star rumours). Marvel has its helmets and its buildable objects and its mahoosive modular sets anchored around minifigures, but adults looking for more affordable options that involve tiny plastic people can only really plump for the middle-ground approach of 76291 The Avengers Assemble: Age of Ultron.
For argument’s sake, here are some other approaches 76291 The Avengers Assemble: Age of Ultron could have taken to the same subject matter.
An 18+ diorama
Look, this set is mostly fine as it goes – those trees in particular, while borrowing techniques we’ve seen in plenty of other sets over the past 18 months, are effective, and the car works very well – but it does feel pretty basic in some areas (the tower, the bunker). Strip out the play functions in favour of a more impressive and detailed build, slap an 18+ label on the box and call it the start of the LEGO Marvel Diorama Collection.
That’s clearly what this set is going for already given how focused it is on posing its minifigures in a deliberate and delicate manner to capture that one specific scene from the opening of Age of Ultron. (Don’t move those minifigures to play with them, little Timmy, what do you think all those transparent rods are for?)
A 3-in-1 build
As noted, there are hints of modularity to 76291 The Avengers Assemble: Age of Ultron in the way the base can be split up and rearranged (you don’t even need to keep the sections connected, which is handy when space is at a premium). But what if it was even more customisable? What if there were enough pieces in the box to rearrange and reconfigure it into, for example, a bunch of different frames from Age of Ultron’s opening sequence?
A mosaic
Bear with us here: 76291 The Avengers Assemble: Age of Ultron is already quite two-dimensional in its approach to this scene, in that it really looks best from one angle (the one that matches what we see on screen) and doesn’t necessarily work as well from others. That’s how the LEGO Group has set it up on the box and in its marketing materials, so it’s clearly cognisant of that fact.
Well, at that point, why not commit fully to the bit and just give us a LEGO Marvel mosaic? Okay, it might need to be literally the largest LEGO set of all time to capture enough detail and make it recognisable. But you know some LEGO Marvel fan out there is prepared to paint an entire wall with something like this…
All those ideas aside, these sets are clearly doing well as they are for the LEGO Group because they’re pressing ahead with them again in January with 76314 Captain America: Civil War Battle. So who knows? Maybe that halfway house really is finding both audiences at once, and the design team is absolutely on to something here. In which case, perhaps we should flip the hypothetical on its head: rather than Marvel following in the footsteps of other themes, those franchises could instead take a leaf out of the Avengers playbook.
Imagine a Mustafar duel that has Anakin jumping over Obi-Wan (‘I have the high ground!’) by way of the same transparent rods that are holding up Thor, Black Widow and company. Or how about Batman throwing Two-Face off the side of a building to save Jim Gordon at the end of The Dark Knight, using those transparent pieces to hold them up in mid-air? Alright, both of those specific examples might be a little too gruesome for a 10+ set, but you see where we’re going with this.
Let us know your thoughts on LEGO Marvel’s proto-dioramas in the comments. Are these sets doing it for you, or do you also feel like they’re caught between two different audiences, attempting to satisfy both while really pleasing neither fully?
This feature is part of our look back over the highs, lows and middles of 2024. Head here to check out more of those, from our favourite sets and minifigures of the year to the biggest surprises, disappointments and news stories of the past 12 months.
This set was provided for review purposes by the LEGO Group.
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